A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood - 2019
Updated: Sep 22, 2022
A Beautiful Day... deserves praise, in my opinion, for the way it is structured and directed. Normally in a biopic with Tom Hanks I'd be talking about the strength of his incredible performance. Here, I want to talk about everything BUT his role. You see that's really the wonder of how this film is built. Wouldn't it be just perfect to make a film about the unassuming Fred Rogers where...HE ISN'T EVEN THE MAIN CHARACTER! It's perfect. That's SO Mr. Rogers. He was always deflecting praise and reducing his message to the most common grounds. He believed in little acts to love your neighbor. Weren't you listening?
But Fred Rogers was anything but timid or magoo-ish (as he's been stereotyped before). He spoke to congress about getting more public funding for education...and won. He cast an African American mailman for his show, and then they dipped their feet together in a kiddy pool on a summer day. This fact wasn't lost on many witnessing America's battles over segregated pools at the time. He wrote an army invasion into the neighborhood of puppets when all the children were hearing their parents talk about Vietnam. Mr. Rogers may have been mild-mannered, but he was not weak. He dealt with real issues with children, and he taught them to how to deal with big people emotions healthily. Fred Rogers was bold and unyielding in his message of love and care for ALL people (Won't you be my neighbor?).
So, it's at this point where we really need to enter the film's director into our discussion. Marielle Heller, another female director under-recognized in this season, steered this ship so impressively. If you read the last paragraph closely enough, you can see my own kind of hero worship creeping in. Rogers was someone for whom these kinds of comparisons could be made. But Heller is having none of that. Her Fred Rogers is a present man, not a distant saint. She adroitly eschews falling headlong into hagiography while still managing to do honor and justice to his cherished name. It's a remarkable feat indeed.
Moreover, structurally A Beautiful Day is brilliant. As previously mentioned, Mr. Rogers may be the shadow hanging over the entire picture, but he is not its chief protagonist. Instead, the film really centers on the real-life journalist Tom Junod, the writer ordered to do a profile on Rogers for Esquire magazine. But what does Heller do from here? She frames the entire film like an episode of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. So, Junod is introduced on a picture board at the beginning of an episode, and the film returns several times to this centering piece (one memorable sequence involves a nightmare where Junod is accosted by almost life-size versions of the show's puppets). In conclusion, Heller found a way to tell an uncommon tale about a truly unique man, and it was one he surely deserved.
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